reflect on the whole journey, and the time left, and what if anything I have learned along the way. I look back at the highways and byways of biography, my own Footsteps and my Sidetracks, and most of all on my strange, unappeased sense of some continuous, intense and inescapable pursuit.
I remember, for instance, the early summer of 1974, when I had just finished my first book, a biography of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was eight hundred pages long and I was nearly thirty. I had travelled in England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Italy in search of my fiery, footloose poet. I felt like a veteran after a long campaign in the field. I felt grizzled, anecdotal, displaced. What’s more, I found that I had returned with two conclusions about writing biography that were certainly not taught back home in academia.
The first was the Footsteps principle. I had come to believe that the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or travelled or dreamed. Not just the birthplace, or the blue-plaque place, but the temporary places, the passing places, the lost places, the dream places.
He – or she – must examine them as intelligently as possible, looking for clues, for the visible and the invisible, for the history, the geography and the atmosphere. He must feel how they once were; must imagine what impact they might once have had. He must be alert to ‘unknown modes of being’. He must step back, step down, step inside the story.
The second was the Two-Sided Notebook concept. It seemed to me that a proper research notebook must always have a form of ‘double accounting’. There should be a distinct, conscious divide between the objective and the subjective sides of the project. This meant keeping a double-entry record of all research as it progressed (or as frequently, digressed). Put schematically, there must be a right-hand side and a left-hand side to every notebook page spread.
On the one (the right) I would record the objective facts of my subject’s life, as minutely and accurately as possible (from the letters, the diaries, the memoirs, the archives). But on the other (the left) I would also record my most personal responses, my feelings and speculations, my questions and conundrums, my difficulties and challenges, my travels and my visions. Irritation, embarrassment, puzzlement or grief could prove as valuable as excitement, astonishment, inspiration or enthusiasm. The cumulative experience of the research journey, of being in my subject’s company over several years, thus became part of the whole biographical enterprise. Only in this way, it seemed to me, could I use, but also hope to master, the biographer’s most valuable but perilous weapon: empathy.
One incident from long before the Shelley days, during my novice pursuit of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Cévennes a decade previously, became an unlikely talisman. It never got into Footsteps, but lay quietly on the left-hand page of my very first notebook for over twenty years. Only much later, when I began to lecture about biography, did I find myself unexpectedly retelling it. To my surprise, it went through various versions, until it had finally metamorphosed from a traveller’s tale into a kind of biographer’s parable. In its developed form it went like this.
I first explained that I was eighteen, and in following Stevenson through the wild Cévennes, I usually slept out deliberately like him under the stars, in a small sleeping bag without a tent, à la belle étoile. But sometimes I was reluctantly forced (by the spectacular Cévennes storms) to spend a night at one of the little remote country inns or hostels. In those days you had to present a passport to be entered in the fichière, with your name, age and occupation included in the details. Under occupation, I had specified with great optimism ‘Writer’. Of course I had published absolutely nothing at that point.
When I handed over my passport to Madame at the reception desk, the same thing always seemed to happen. ‘Ah, Monsieur ’Olmez,’ she would exclaim grimly as she filled in the little buff index card, ‘I see you are a waiter.’ I reflected painfully on this for some days, and then thought of putting in ‘Travel Writer’. But then I could immediately hear the even grimmer response. ‘Ah Monsieur ’Olmez, I see you are a table waiter.’
This tale, suitably embellished with Gallic accents and hand gestures, became known as my ‘travelling waiter joke’. Yet it gradually revealed to me a serious lesson in professional humility. Because in a sense that’s exactly what a biographer is: someone who waits, who awaits, who pays attention, who is constantly alert, who attends upon his subjects, who is at their service for a long period of faithful employment. Waiting done well, I reflected, involves a lot of legwork.
Accordingly, my next pursuit, in the service of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lasted, on and off, for nearly fifteen years and progressed through some thirty two-sided notebooks. It took me to the English West Country and Lake District, to Germany, to Italy, to Sicily, to Malta, and finally to a quiet garden on Highgate Hill in London. It ended in nine hundred pages over two volumes. We both aged considerably in the process.
Coleridge was himself the master of the notebook – over seventy of them survive, thanks to the life’s work of the Canadian scholar Kathleen Coburn. The first was begun in Bristol in 1794, when he was twenty-one; the last was left incomplete at his death in Highgate in 1834. They provide a wonderful underground river for the biographer, an entry into Coleridge’s mind and heart, his inner life, not least in his relations with William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and his secret beloved or femme fatale, his ‘Asra’, Sara Hutchinson.
The notebooks are as multifarious, elusive and incorrigible as the man. They contain his fantastic reading lists, his extraordinary nightmares, his brilliant lecture notes, his hectic fell-walking diaries, his endless self-psychoanalysis sessions, his battles with opium addiction, his excruciating medical symptoms (teeth, lungs, bowels), his sexual hauntings and obsessions, his labyrinthine thoughts about science and religion, his ghastly puns and his moving prayers.
They are also full of wonderful oddities: the draft of a comic novel, the recipe for making waterproof shoe polish, accounts of erotic dreams (partially in Greek and usually connected with food), the sayings of his child Hartley, notes on the sounds of different birdsong, or observations on different kinds and modalities of rainfall. All the time, like the underground river of ‘Kubla Khan’, there is a continual bubbling up of images that would appear in both his poetry and his later criticism; but also a continuous stream of self-definition.
I remember discovering, like a sudden gold-strike, this description of a tiny waterfall on the River Greta, which he wrote when he first came to the Lake District in 1800: ‘Shootings of water threads down the slope of the huge green stone … The white Eddy-rose that blossomed up against the Stream in the scollop, by fits and starts, Obstinate in resurrection – It is the Life that we live.’
It instantly struck me that Coleridge was describing himself – ‘obstinate in resurrection’. Now I can never see a stream flowing over a stone, with that bubbling backwash of foam (so brilliantly defined as the ‘eddy-rose’), without thinking of his biography. There is his complex, mysterious and in many ways disastrous life, which was nevertheless perpetually renewed, miraculously foaming back in words, ‘obstinate in resurrection’. It was indeed the life that he lived. I gradually realised it was also the Life that I needed to write.
Coleridge’s travels were geographical as well as metaphysical, and true to the Footsteps principle I followed him faithfully. In exchange, Coleridge taught me many lessons about biography during these research trips or solitary pursuits. I followed his walk over the wild Quantock Hills and down to the tiny seaport at Watchet where he began The Ancient Mariner with Wordsworth in 1797. Here the Bristol Channel surges out towards the Atlantic, producing one of the most astonishing tidal swings in the whole of northern Europe, rising and falling over thirty feet in twelve hours. Watching the fishing boats locked in its muscular grasp, I understood something new about the submarine ‘Polar Spirit’
